The Wonderland

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Well, things work differently around here.

Most fantasy worlds are unrealistic in some way or another, but at least they are reasonable. Wonderland is... different. The details vary, of course, but they are invariably strange places filled with strange phenomena and populated by strange people. But they are not so far gone as to permit absolutely anything - Wonderland still makes sense, but not that kind of sense.

Many will have a theme of some sort, especially if there is An Aesop. The Mental World and Dream Land are often wonderlands; there is also a certain amount of overlap with the World of Symbolism or the Land of Faerie.

A type of Eldritch Location. Compare to Another Dimension, which makes more conventional sense, and the World of Chaos, which makes less.

Examples of The Wonderland include:

Anime and Manga

• Kamichu!: A junior-high-schoolgirl waking up one day and realizing she's a god is odd enough. The land of the gods, however, where other gods like Laserdisc God reside, is very Wonderland-like.
• The Digital World drifts into this on occasion, depending on the Digimon continuity and location.

Comic Books

• In Superman, Htrae is a Bizarro Earth, a cubic planet where things are the opposite of earth. It's also very inconsistent due to the fact that various authors chose to focus on different aspects and also had different ideas of "opposite."
• The Dreaming from Sandman
• The 1950s strip from the Anthology Comic The Beano Pansy Potter in Wonderland.
• The B.D. Philemon has Le Monde du Lettres (The World of Letters), a chain of islands which is shaped like the letters of "ATLANTIC OCEAN" that you'd see on a map or globe, which technically doesn't exist, and is inhabited by everything from people with butterfly wings to centaurs.

Film

• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Although only Halloween Town and Christmas Town are shown, presumably each of the holiday towns are a themed wonderland following their own logic.
  • One episode of The Critic expands the theme with Hanukkah Town.

Literature

• Alice in Wonderland: Trope Namer, though it's debatable whether it's better described as a World of Chaos.
• The Lands Beyond, of The Phantom Tollbooth.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The inside of the factory is essentially a candy-themed wonderland.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After hitching a ride off Earth, every place just gets weirder and weirder. Then there's the Infinite Improbability Drive, which is capable of making reality leave the building.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: So your house falls down onto a witch, and you meet a talking scarecrow, robot, and lion... the entire Land of Oz is a strange wonderland.
  • The author of the Oz books, L. Frank Baum, felt it made perfect sense, and was offended that it was compared to Alice in Wonderland!
• Venus in the Robert Rankin book "The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age".

Video Games

• Katamari Damacy: the sky broke, and it can be fixed by rolling a sticky ball around earth to create replacement stars. Rolling around the world, seeing a child riding a panda bear motorcycle is not unusual.
• LittleBigPlanet: Especially owing to the user-created content and the customizable nature of the game.